‘Photography is just luck. There was a fence, and I poked my camera through the fence. It’s a fraction of a second.’ – HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON
Speed and instinct were at the heart of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s brilliance as a photographer. And never did he combine the two better than on the day in 1932 when he pointed his Leica camera through a fence behind Paris’ Saint-Lazare train station.
There sulting image is a masterpiece of form and light. As a man leaps across the water,evoking the dancers in a poster on the wall behind him, the ripples in the puddle around the ladder mimic the curved metal pieces nearby. Cartier-Bresson, shooting with a nimble35-millimeter camera and no flash, saw these components all come together for a brief moment and clicked his shutter.
Timing is everything, and no other photographer’s was better. The image would become the quintessential example of Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment,” his lyrical term for the ability to immortalize a fleeting scene on film.It was a fast, mobile, detail-obsessed style that would help chart the course for all of modern photography.
